Scot on the Rocks

“That is not an option.”

“People get sick, don’t they?” she asked, head still turned. “Just pretend you’re sick.”

“Yes,” Jack said, “she can say that she caught something fierce spending all that time at the nursing home.”

“Okay, then,” Vanessa said, turning her head back to the table, “you should totally pay some hot escort dude to go and pretend to be Douglas. It would be hysterical. We could totally pretend that Douglas has a title, too! The wedding’s out in California, so it’s not like anyone would know! He does have an accent, after all.”

“Just because you have an accent, you think that people assume that you’re royalty?” I asked.

“Douglas certainly acted as if he thought he was royalty,” Jack said.

“No,” Vanessa explained, “an accent just makes it less of a stretch.”

“Yes,” Jack said, “and with all of those Hollywood egomaniacs there, it’s not like anyone would really notice you, anyway. You could just be the stunning, mysterious lawyer with the international man of mystery on your arm.”

“In a skirt,” I pointed out.

“In a skirt,” Vanessa said, lifting her arms to the table again.

“But with a title,” Jack said.

“With a title,” Vanessa sang.

“This could actually work, you know,” I said, gulping down the contents of martini number two. I think I may have gulped the flower, too, in my haste.

“Yeah,” Vanessa laughed, finishing her martini, too, “except for the fact that I was totally kidding!”

“No, really,” I said, “this could totally work. This is the solution,” I said, motioning for our waitress to come over.

“No more martinis for you,” Jack said.

“He’s right. No more martinis for me,” I said to the waitress. “Three shots of Southern Comfort, please.”

“And exactly where do you think you will be able to find this hot escort dude on such short notice?” Vanessa asked.

“And, more importantly,” Jack asked, “did we learn nothing from Risky Business? ”

“Well, then, I won’t use a hot escort dude,” I explained.

“You won’t do it at all because it is totally insane!” Vanessa laughed.

I looked at Jack.

“Oh, I know that look,” he said. “Don’t even think about it.”

But I kept looking at him. With that look. You know that look. That look of seduction. That look that you use to get what you want, when you want it. The type of look you’d use at the post office when you really, really, really need to get your package out that day and they tell you that you filled out the wrong form and you have to go back and get it and you do, only, you really, really, really don’t want to wait on the line again, so you sort of smile that smile and pray that the man will take pity on you/want to sleep with you/think you’ll like him if he’ll be nice to you. That look.

“That’s the look she gives word processing when she wants her job to get done before everyone else’s,” Jack said.

“That’s the look she gives at Bergdorf’s when she wants the salesman to pull out every size nine that’s on sale,” Vanessa said.

“What?” he asked.

“Oh, just look at her feet, man. Run while you have the chance!”

“You are a frustrated actor, Jackie….” I explained, hanging a little too long on the pronunciation of each word. The sweet talk is a quintessential part of the look. Although I wouldn’t recommend using that part at the post office. For the post office, the mere look itself usually suffices.

But it was true. Jack was one of those lawyers who started out thinking that it was a day job (never mind those silly people who actually dream of becoming a lawyer). Jack made a deal with himself (and his father) after graduating college with a joint degree in drama and English — he would give his childhood dream of acting two years. If he wasn’t a success (read: couldn’t pay the rent on his fifth-floor walk-up studio apartment), he would go to law school and become a lawyer like his father, the federal judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, wanted him to be. Even though he spent his two years after graduation waiting tables and going on countless auditions, he never made it big, getting only enough jobs to give him hope, but not enough to actually pay his bills. To his father’s delight, Jack reluctantly made good on his end of the deal and went to law school once his two years were up.

Jack enrolled in his father’s alma mater and didn’t look back, throwing himself into the law as vehemently as he did everything else in his life. I always thought that he had to throw himself in with as much vigor as he could in order to make himself forget that it wasn’t what he truly wanted to do. He made Law Review, Moot Court, got his Student Note published, and was the president of the Student Bar Association. And he somehow still managed to be in the top ten percent of his class. Vanessa and I made Law Review at our law school, too, but it was only because we didn’t do anything else besides study. And shop for shoes, but back then, such trips were considerably less intense than they are nowadays, what with our student budgets. What? You need to release your law-school stress somehow.

But Jack still was — and I guess probably always would be, beneath the navy sports jacket — an actor at heart. In going to law school, he discovered that the natural place for any frustrated actor is in the courtroom. He became a litigator in the vain hope that someday he would be in a courtroom where he could dramatically yell: “I’m out of order? You’re out of order! This whole courtroom is out of order!” (When in reality, we litigators know that it’s much more likely that you’d exclaim: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”)

“Let me get this straight,” Jack said. “I told you that I would save the day and go with you to this wedding.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you said no,” he said.

“Well, if you want to be technical about it,” I said. I couldn’t believe he was being so difficult. Didn’t he feel bad about the whole kissing-a-junior-associate thing? How quickly they forget. Men can be so insensitive sometimes.

“But now you want to go to this wedding with me, pretending to be Douglas?”

“Did we not explain the power of an accent to you? Anyway, Trip is expecting me and my skirt-wearing boyfriend, not me and some other guy.”

“No way in hell,” he said, turning away. He grabbed his shot of Southern Comfort and downed it.

“Come on! It would be a great role for you. Great practice.”

“Brooke, you have officially lost your mind,” Vanessa offered.

“And offended me,” Jack offered, but neither of us was really listening to him.

“Pleeeeease?”

“Luckily for me, I don’t act anymore,” Jack said, brushing his shaggy hair out of his eyes. Was that his strongest argument? He was going to have to try harder than that.

“Pretty pleeeeease?”

“And even if I did, I certainly would never condescend to play Douglas of all people,” he said.

“Pretty pleeeeease with sugar on top?”

“That fact, coupled with the fact that I also hate L.A., makes it highly unlikely that you will be able, within the course of the next two weeks, to convince me to go with you to L.A. and perpetrate a fraud on the entire Scottish community.”

“So your answer is no?” I asked, eyelashes batting. For the record, I never had this much trouble at the post office.

“No,” he said, turning away from me and leaving the table for effect.

Famous last words.